TOT: edicashon

I disagree; its follows the rule:-

his; hers; its are the masculine; feminine; neuter possessives

- none of which take an apostrophe.

For those of us who use Thunderbird, and are not up to your standards, there is "Grammar and Spell Checker ? LanguageTool" add on, which helps with commas and general grammar.

They are possessive pronouns - my, our, your, his, her, its, and their.

'It' can also me a noun, and a possessive noun. Like men men's and mens'

Oh, I am more than aware of that now.

As a counter-argument, I posit the persuasive argument that "apostrophe s" added to a noun is usually taken to make the noun possessive.

"Dave's", for instance.

Or "the dog's bollocks".

Quite so.

Competing theories are:

(a) that the "...'s..." added to a noun is an abbreviation of the word "his" (and irrespective of the gender of the noun or proper noun) and

(b) (as an alternative explanation), that it represents the elided "e" from the form, using "King" as an example, "Kinges", accepted as a one-time form of denoting possession (though pronouncing the "es" would seem to me to be a way of adding the "his" to the word in speech whilst distinguishing the two senses by a pronunciation difference).

Example:

"Sejanus His Fall", a 1603 play by Shakespeare contemporary Ben Jonson.

I like the "his" version better.

or even "the dogs' bollocks" when there are several dogs under consideration!

'its' is the neutral of 'his' and 'hers', AIUI.

Even Shakespeare fell into that trap.

you should fight back and call them master baiters,

that's like wot me n the queen would do.

At my old school, teachers were called "masters". Teasing, taunting or imitating them was called "baiting". Hence imitating a teacher was referred to as "master baiting".

Thanks to my teachers:

- Miss Griffiths: who couldn't get her brain around the fact that I was a "difficult" child who could read before I went to school (because my dad's parents were both teachers and taught me whenever I stayed with them, and my parents encouraged me to read as well). She sat me in a corner (in the class "library") and told me not to come back as soon as I'd read the next graded "Tip and Mitten" reading book. I missed out on other lessons such as handwriting because I was "put in the naughty (clever buggers) corner".

- Mrs Thornton: an excellent teacher, infinite patience - but don't get too close to her because her breath stinks of dogshit :-(

- Mrs Hurst: she alleged that I gave her eczema because I was always "worried" and because I (literally) ate pencils (chewed the end, then swallowed the wood).

- Mrs Crowther: another great teacher

- Mr Smith: a genial, avuncular chap who taught English language but also read to us various books to us (The Ghosts, aka The Amazing Mr Blunden; The Case of the Silver Egg (Desmond Skirrow); The Hobbit) and got us used to analysing the storytelling techniques.

- Mr Butcher: he mainly taught PE and was constantly flexing his athletic body (the character Doug Digby in "The Grimleys" could have been modelled on him). But he also taught English. Corporal punishment ("the slipper") was allowed at this school, and he threatened us with three different sizes of trainer shoe for different grades of offence: Mini-Whacker was a size 5, Tiger-Whacker was a size 7 with go-faster stripes, Super-Whacker was a size

- Mr Elliot and Mr Wilson: English literature: As You Like It, Macbeth and Henry V as Shakespeare plays; Kim, Oliver Twist and Cider with Rosie as novels. A pretty comprehensive syllabus just for O level. Oliver Twist was a damn good good story and made some very incisive points about the workhouse system, once you learned to gloss over Dickens' more flowery passages (*). As You Like It was actually funny when we saw it performed at the National Theatre. Macbeth was gruesome and over-dramatic; Henry V was utterly dire with no discernable redeeming features.

(*) The opening sentence is not really attention-grabbing: "Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small ? to wit, a workhouse and in this workhouse was born, on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events, the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter." It could be precis'ed as: "Oliver Twist was born in a workhouse. You don't need to know when or where: it's not relevant yet in the story."

Or the dogs' bollocks' contents if you're into green slime.

Bill

Green slime? Can?t say I?m au fait with my dog?s bollocks but I?m pretty sure they?re not full of green slime. Dog?s gallbladders maybe?

Tim

I've published 5 books and have a mega good vocabulary, but I seriously don't give a damn about perfect English.

1. Many highly talented and creative people are dyslexic
2. A huge number of English speakers have it as second language or less
3. English spelling is a nightmare, yes... ghoti spells "fish". Russian is written exactly as it's said, for instance.
4. Since failing miserably to even pronounce Chinese let alone learn it I say "well done" to all with "interesting" English accents.

I applaud all those who have learned to say "Beatles" and "my tailor is rich, my sister is not a boy". Worldwide communication. Great. What could be better.

I had two Mr Smith's. One taught English and looked like sergeant Bilko and was thus named Bilko. The other taught history and walked with a pronounced limp using a stick. He was known as Bongo. Bongo was also deaf and used a hearing aid. Children would speak very quietly until he turned the hearing aid volume up then suddenly speak very loudly so he scrabbled to turn it down again?

One that annoys me, often heard on the BBC, is "between twenty to thirty" when they mean between twenty AND thirty.

After all, you wouldn't say "I live between Edinburgh to Glasgow"

On Sat, 11 Dec 2021 at 15:11:45, "Dave Plowman (News)" snipped-for-privacy@davenoise.co.uk> wrote (my responses usually follow points raised):

It's not intuitive, is it!

Well, there needed to be _some_ way of distinguishing between "it is" and "belonging to it".

that's certainly a good way of _remembering_ it. It's not entirely a full explanation, because there is no word "hi" (in that sense anyway, with a short-pronounced i). [It would be hims, but we don't use that.]

(I presume you meant "be".)

I can't think of a case where I'd use "mens'". "Men's", certainly. (I think you were thinking of distinguishing the singular possessive from the plural possessive, as in boy boy's boys'; however, men is already a plural. It would be man man's mans', except we never use mans to mean more than one man.)

(Where I read it!)

OT, but we have a blog owned and edited by a gal with whom I had an acquaintanceship; it is about the old times in our area of Pennsylvania complete with photos, stories and comments. Fairly popular, too.

She wrote: "Us grandkids ran barefoot around that yard every summer for our entire adolescence."

I told her to take my comments in good faith, but that you would never say "Us ran barefoot around that yard every summer for our entire adolescence." So it has to be "WE" (grandkids). Almost intuitive, eh?

She didn't take my correction in good faith, and I never heard from her again.

On Thu, 16 Dec 2021 at 08:31:43, Mack A. Damia snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote (my responses usually follow points raised): []

As well as just ignorance of grammar, as you rightly showed, it can also be a regional folk usage - some would say appropriate for reminiscences of a barefoot childhood.

So while agreeing with you technically, it wouldn't even have occurred to me to correct it. (The only incongruity being that such "folk usage" doesn't really go with a vocabulary that includes the word "adolescence", but I can't think what less sophisticated word could have been used.)

General language chat, since APIHNA indulges in such (or did when not moribund as now) - we don't _just_ talk about apostrophes! - I presume this is the US usage of "yard" (as also in "yard sale" and "yard work"), to mean a (not tiny) back garden, or at least different to the UK usage: in UK, a "yard" is a small area behind or in front of a house, with a hard surface (e. g. cement, concrete, or brick). Confused me (especially "yard work") in US text until I realised what it meant in US. (Here, the only "yard work" I can think of would be a few minutes to sweep it with a broom, or standing in it to do maintenance on drainpipes on the house, or similar. From what I've read, in US it means gardening tasks, such as weeding, mowing, digging, and so on.)

We is intrested in evveryfink!